Pride
by giant-sequoia
Summary: A message from Zinyak provokes an emotional response from the boss of the Saints.


"**Pride"**

_Kinzie_

Occasionally she did get tired of staring at computer screens, but naps were a luxury she could no longer afford. Perhaps, in time... when there was more than one other person on the ship consistently inhabiting the same reality as she. Not yet. Keith had his talents, but monitoring the simulation was a task best left to her.

The caffeinated substance provided by the ship's replicator resembled coffee only by the effectiveness of its stimulant. It was grey, opaque, and tasted like body odour smelled.

Kinzie forced herself to take another sip and blinked rapidly a few times to clear the itch of tiredness from her eyes. The boss's vitals were stable, his pulse calm and his breathing relaxed even as, in the simulation, he wreaked havoc with his favourite submachine guns and exploding shockwaves. Kinzie hadn't believed him when he first told her, but pandemonium really did seem to soothe Santiago. Given his current activities, his endorphin levels would have presented a medical and psychological curiosity at the very least, if the institutions of human medicine and psychology had still existed.

Meanwhile, the simulation itself convulsed with the damage he was causing to its various systems. Matrices collapsed as their values rolled over, inflated beyond the stress tolerances of simulated physics. Rampant subroutines fallen to infinite loop careened down overflowing data highways, shedding broken functions in their wake and destabilizing entire modules. Kinzie had long since dragged her error feed over to a side monitor and left it there, confident that its stream of damage reports would not stop or even slow for some time yet.

The chaos was almost beautiful, in a way. The architecture of the vast program before her was a wonder to behold, but more wondrous still was how it fought to keep itself upright. It was succeeding, for now, but the time would come when Kinzie would engineer its total collapse. She looked forward to that moment with a kind of bitter glee. Perhaps it was the Saint in her, but as much as she appreciated the marvel of engineering that was Zinyak's virtual realm, the thought of tearing it down gave her a perverse sense of pleasure. She wondered if this was how Santiago felt when he blew things up.

Of course, the alien overlord would tolerate Santiago's boisterous hell-raising only so long before he dispatched a warden. Kinzie noted the incoming signal with dry amusement as she took another cringing sip of the godawful stimulant. Santiago had killed and assimilated nearly a dozen of the ugly things since arriving in virtual Steelport. Kinzie no longer even bothered warning him that one was about to show up, and he no longer expected her to. The rain of fire was blatant enough, after all.

It took him a few minutes. Zinyak's wardens had gotten better at evading his shield-breaking blasts, perhaps learning from the battles of their fallen brethren, but none of them had yet succeeded in taking him down. This one was no different. As soon as Santiago assimilated the warden's code, Kinzie gave it a once-over, looking for anything new. Nothing had shown up in a while that would give him another power, but more root access was always helpful. She lifted and "corrected" a few lines of code like she always did, diverting the warden's resources to Santiago. The boss, meanwhile, had taken off like a rocket after a fleeing command CID. He never seemed to care, or even notice, that killing and absorbing a warden invariably encouraged every nearby Zin to back off for a while. There was no need to take out the CIDs, but he did it anyway. Kinzie had to admit that tearing around the city at the insane velocities he regularly clocked did seem like a lot of fun. Not as fun as dissecting alien code and co-opting it to serve humanity, but fun nonetheless.

The devastation subsided as Santiago left the area, hunting down the CID. The simulation struggled to pull itself back together, repairing the damage he had caused, but as always a few new cracks had appeared that – with help from Kinzie – wouldn't quite close.

Santiago destroyed the CID and came to a halt in an intersection. Kinzie glanced briefly at her overhead view feed, but he was just standing in the street. No immediate danger. She went back to exploiting the breaks his most recent rampage had caused.

A moment later her gaze shot back to him as a subdued alarm went off on one of her interfaces. It was the one which measured Santiago's vital signs. Paradoxically, only _now_ – when the excitement and thrill of combat and chase had ended – was his pulse climbing, his stress hormones elevating. Within moments, Kinzie could hear him – physically _hear_ his body hyperventilating in his stasis pod across the room. His brain waves became erratic.

Confused and concerned, Kinzie held down a key. "Boss?" she said over her channel. "You okay?"

There was no answer. She stared at her overhead view. He had been standing in the middle of the street before, but now he was on his hands and knees. He seemed to be in pain.

Rapidly, she ran a systematic check on his surroundings. There were no Zin nearby. Her firewalls were intact. The simulation was, more or less, stable where he stood. She could identify no apparent source of any immediate danger to Santiago. What the hell was going on?

She tried again. "Boss! What's the matter? Talk to me!"

Nothing. His cortisol and epinephrine levels were climbing steadily. His physical body continued to hyperventilate.

Real alarm was creeping up on Kinzie. He was panicked about _something_, but she couldn't tell what, and she couldn't see any way to help him – not by her usual methods, at least. What to do?

Biting her lip, Kinzie twisted around in her seat to look at his body across the room, upright and unconscious. The rich darkness of his skin was shiny with sweat. His chest rose and fell with rapid, shallow breaths.

* * *

_Santiago_

He loved chasing down command CIDs. Their shiny golden aura, their challenging, weaving flight, their hilariously pathetic attempts to talk him down. _"You should abandon this pursuit."_ _"You will not be able to catch me."_ And yet he did – every time.

He stretched out a hand as he closed the final gap. Electric tingles raced up his arm from his fingers the moment they made contact with the machine, but the pain didn't even slow him down. He gripped tightly with his telekinetic will. The CID buzzed in protest for a split second as he wheeled it around above his head and brought it crashing down on the pavement. There was a deliciously metallic _crunch_, followed by another as his other fist slammed down to complete the destruction. The CID exploded into fragments of code that fizzled away in red light.

Chest heaving, Santiago straightened with a satisfied smile. Lots more Zin dead, another warden assimilated, another CID destroyed. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms back. The world he currently inhabited was clearly virtual upon close inspection, but he still marveled at the detail of sensation he experienced. It would take him a while to come down from the high of prolonged combat and destruction, his fight with the warden, and the CID chase. He took a few deep breaths.

What to do next? There was a tower nearby he hadn't climbed yet, and he was in the mood to fly. A break from causing chaos would probably do him good. He needed to pace himself or he would get drunk on violence.

He crouched down, preparing to launch himself into the air. As he did, his eye caught a sign on the nearby Friendly Fire. It was one of Zinyak's messages. Something about the shape of the sentence on this sign told Santiago that it was one he hadn't seen before.

Santiago had long since stopped paying attention to those signs. SUBMIT ACCEPT COMPLY. TRUST US. OBEY US. HAIL ZINYAK. It was all bullshit, of course, and once he had determined that there were a finite number of different messages, seen them all, and found nothing useful in any of them, there was no need to keep looking.

But that had been before he had escaped his pod on the mothership, before-

7 BILLION PEOPLE PAID FOR YOUR PRIDE.

A choked noise escaped his throat. Darkness seemed to creep in at the edges of his vision. Hot iron bands tightened around his chest.

The building which carried the sign rippled as its pixels briefly made themselves obvious. In the shifting pattern, he saw the planet bursting again, and again and again. He couldn't force the sight of it out of his head. It would never stop.

He blinked away the blurriness in his vision, but it came back immediately. He was on his hands and knees. There was blood on the pavement below his face. His mouth was dry as sand, but there were tears in his eyes. The awful tightness hadn't let up on his chest. He tried to breathe, but it just hurt more.

Kinzie was talking to him, but it was like she spoke another language. He could hear only screaming. Everyone he had killed, all seven billion of them, were screaming in his ears at once. They were tearing at his face, beating on his head, wrapping chains around his chest. They were inside his body, forcing bile up his throat and blood out his nose.

They hated him for what he'd done. He would never be free of them. He would burn forever for this.

* * *

_Kinzie_

There was no time left. If she didn't get him out of there and calmed him down, he would die of a heart attack. It was unthinkable – the boss, her invincible boss, her _friend_, killed by a panic attack. She couldn't let it happen.

It was dangerous to yank him out when he was minutes' flight or more from a gateway, but there was no other choice. She enacted an emergency disconnect from the simulation and stayed at her console just long enough to make sure it hadn't killed him before racing across the room to his pod.

Santiago convulsed in the restraints as his mind imploded to a point and reexpanded in his meatspace body. It would only make him feel worse for a few moments, but she needed to _talk_ to him to help him, and to do that she needed him face to face.

He let out a hoarse cry and flailed as the restraining bars disengaged.

"Boss!" Kinzie yelled. "I've got you. You're safe!"

She was terrified. Was that the right thing to say? She couldn't fix this with a patch or a new subroutine. She had no idea what she was doing.

He fell forward into her arms, knocking the wind out of her. Kinzie was petite, and Santiago was a tank. He probably outweighed her by forty kilos or more. He was talking, but she was too busy twisting around to avoid being crushed beneath him as he fell onto the deck to listen. She managed to get an arm around his chest to slow his descent, but she was off balance and he hit the floor hard. She barely managed not to fall over herself. He seemed to come to some of his senses just in time to flash out a hand and break his fall.

"Boss," Kinzie said urgently as she knelt beside him. She reached out to touch his shoulder, pulling her hand back just in time as she remembered he didn't like being touched. "What happened? What can I do, what do you need?"

His shoulders were heaving. His skin was damp with sweat. His mohawk was disheveled. He kept whispering, ignoring her. She couldn't make out what he was saying.

"Boss, _talk_ to me," Kinzie pleaded.

He seemed to become aware of his presence and where they were without really looking at her. He kept staring at the deck. His words slowed a little and rose above a whisper. She listened.

"My fault," he said. "My fault. My fault. My fault."

There was a moment of nothingness in her mind, and then brutal understanding. Kinzie briefly covered her eyes as tears welled.

"It's my fault," he said, over and over again. Tears of his own landed on the deck between his splayed hands. She had never seen Santiago cry before, never even imagined he could.

"I killed them. I killed them."

"_No_," she whispered fiercely. "It wasn't you."

"It was _me_," he snarled with such sudden volume that she recoiled in shock. Nothing more followed; his rage had surfaced long enough for those three words and then sunk again under the overwhelming tide of guilt and despair.

"Me. It was me. I killed them all. I... I..."

His tears were overcoming his ability to talk. Kinzie wanted so badly to hug him.

"Boss," she said.

He shook his head.

"Boss, _no_," Kinzie insisted. She maneuvered herself around so that she was kneeling in front of him. Again she reached out for his shoulders, but pulled back.

"Boss, can I-"

When she hesitated, he looked up. His eyes were red. There was such a void of hopelessness in his gaze that she had to fight back a sob. She gestured again, indicating she wanted to hug him. He looked downward for a moment.

_Let me comfort you_, she implored silently.

He nodded, still not meeting her gaze. Kinzie shuffled forward and folded her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder, and she felt him rest his head on hers. His arms tightened around her. She let the tears flow.

"Kinzie, I..."

She lifted one hand to stroke the side of his head.

"It wasn't your fault," she murmured. "Zinyak did it. It was Zinyak. _Zinyak_, not you." She repeated the hated name several times, trying to instill the notion in Santiago's head. She felt him trembling, and for a moment she wondered if he really would collapse under the awful weight of his guilt. Nothing else in his life had ever come close to breaking his will, but nothing else had ever come close to the magnitude of their loss, either.

Then she felt his hand on her back curling into a fist.

"Zinyak," he said, so softly she barely heard him, but with such venom that it sent a chill down her spine.

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

"We'll make him pay," Kinzie whispered. "I promise you, boss, he won't get away with it."

"It's my promise to make," he said. "I might not have pulled the trigger, but I caused it all the same."

"You'll get it done." She drew back a little so she could look him in the eye. The void was gone, but there was still a terrible, hungry darkness in his gaze. She had never been more afraid of Santiago than she was at that moment, and yet – strangely – she had never felt closer to him, either.

"I will," he said. "And you'll help me."

She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything more yet.

His arms had fallen to his sides. She made to pull back from their embrace, and he almost let her. Then he lifted his arms again.

"Wait. Just..."

Kinzie was surprised, but she gladly allowed him to pull her back into a hug.

"Just hold me for a while," he whispered. "Please?"

She hugged him tightly, blinking away her tears.


End file.
